I was helping provide a short workshop on implementing a wiki for a union last week and was asked about gathering a list of links through a wiki. It is certainly possible, but I thought it was also useful to explore the the idea of using a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us to gather/organize those links.

This is an example of some of the ways links can be an example of how it could be useful I'll start from my own account. I've got over 1000 links that I've collected over the last two years, they are all organized informally using my an informal taxonomy of keywords that I simply enter when I'm adding a new link. The Del.icio.us interface usually provides lists of related keywords that you can assign when you are adding a link. There are a number of tools that you can add to your browser that make this quite effortless. Here are my links, and they are also automatically added to the OpenConcept site using an RSS aggregator.

I have quite a few union clients and sites that I am watching, so I created a union tag.

Quite a few other people have tagged links with the term union too. You get to gain access to all of the links that other people have added publicly to their profile. Not all of these are for labour unions as some of these are technical, others political.

From that list you can pick out individuals who have tagged sites with certain terms and see their full list of public links. This is a good way to find knowledgeable people and what they think is important:

You can also look for two keywords. In this case I wanted links for all sites that had been tagged with union & Drupal hoping to get a list of Drupal sites for labour unions.

Finally, people in a workplace or organization can associate together in a network which allows you to see recent posts to that network. If 5-10 researchers were all part of the same network using a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us then it would be quite easy for all of the researchers to have a better sense of what the useful links are on a hot subject. My network is here.

There are a number of social bookmarking sites like this, but this is one of the biggest. Like many sites it is possible to replicate its functionality in Drupal if you wanted to have a internal list of links for your staff. I'm not sure that this would be as effective as usint a larger Web 2.0 solution, but it is possible.